originality.  In this instance, too, as in others, the instinctive rectitude of his genius is manifest in that, the subject once chosen, and the work begun, he thenceforth lost himself in the inspiration of his theme; all thoughts of popularity and pay being swallowed up in the supreme regards of Nature and Truth.  For so, in his case, however prudence might dictate the plan, poetry was sure to have command of the execution.  If he was but human in electing what to do, he became divine as soon as he went to doing it.  And it is further considerable that, with all his borrowings in this play, the Poet nowhere drew more richly or more directly from his own spring.  The whole life of the work is in what he gave, not in what he took; the mechanism of the story being used but as a skeleton to underpin and support the eloquent contexture of life and beauty.  In the novel, Paulina and the Clown are wanting altogether; while Capnio yields but a slight hint, if indeed it be so much, towards the part of Antolycus.  And, besides the great addition of life and matter in these persons, the play has several other judicious departures from the novel.

In Leontes all the revolting features of Pandosto, save his jealousy, and the headstrong insolence and tyranny thence proceeding, are purged away; so that while the latter has neither intellect nor generosity to redeem his character, jealousy being the least of his faults, the other has a liberal stock of both.  And in Bellaria the Poet had little more than a bare framework of incident wherein to set the noble, lofty womanhood of Hermione,—­a conception far, far above the reach of such a mind as Greene’s.  In the matter of the painted statue, Shakespeare, so far as is known, was altogether without a model, as he is without an imitator; the boldness of the plan being indeed such as nothing but entire success could justify, and wherein it is hardly possible to conceive of anybody but Shakespeare’s having succeeded.  And yet here it is that we are to look for the idea and formal cause of Hermione’s character, while her character, again, is the shaping and informing power of the whole drama.  For this idea is really the living centre and organic law in and around which all the parts of the work are vitally knit together.  But, indeed, the Poet’s own most original and inimitable mode of conceiving and working out character is everywhere dominant.

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So much has been said about the anachronisms of this play, that it seems needful to add a word concerning them.  We have already seen that the making of seaports and landing of ships in Bohemia were taken from Greene.  Mr. Verplanck conjectures that by Bohemia Shakespeare meant simply the land of the Boii, an ancient people several tribes of whom settled in the maritime parts of France:  but I hardly think he would have used the name with so much license at a time when the boundaries of that country were so well fixed and so widely known.  For the events